Interviewer Profiles

Dr Alexandra Watkins is an Adjunct Research Fellow and Teaching Associate in literary studies at Monash. Her research includes the South Asian diaspora, multiculturalism policy, Islamophobia, refugee identities, postcolonial fiction, and touristic literature. She has published Problematic Identities in Women’s Fiction of the Sri Lankan Diaspora (2015). Her work has appeared in Postcolonial Text, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, and Mascara Literary Review, and she has been a guest panelist on the Radio National “Subcontinental Bookclub Show”.

Dr Maryam Mirza is Assistant Professor in World Literatures in English at Durham University. She previously held a BeIPD-COFUND Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the University of Liege, and a Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Bonn; she has also taught at several colleges and universities in Pakistan, including Kinnaird College for Women. She is the author of a monograph entitled Intimate Class Acts: Friendship and Desire in Indian and Pakistani Women’s Fiction (Oxford University Press, 2016), and her work has appeared in journals such as The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Journal of Postcolonial Writing and South Asian Diaspora, as well as in anthologies.

Dr Chris Ringrose has a BA in English from the University of Cambridge and won a Canada Council Doctoral Fellowship to do his PhD at The University of Alberta. He was Assistant Professor of English at Dalhousie University, before moving to the University of North Carolina and the University of Northampton, where he was awarded the University’s prize for teaching excellence. He is currently Adjunct Associate Professor of English at Monash. His poetry has won awards in England, Canada and Australia, and he has published critical work on modern fiction, literary theory and children’s literature. Recent publications include New Soundings in Postcolonial Writing (2016; with Janet Wilson) and “Redreaming the World: The Poetry of Ben Okri” in Callaloo (2015). He co-edits the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, and the book series Studies in World Literature for Ibidem/Columbia University Press, and is a poetry reviewer for the Australian Poetry Journal.

Dr Birte Heidemann is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Chair of Postcolonial Literary and Cultural Studies, University of Bremen, Germany. From 2008 to 2014, she has taught at the Department of English at Chemnitz University of Technology, Germany. Her most recent publications include Post-Agreement Northern Irish Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) and the co-edited collection Reworking Postcolonialism (Palgrave, 2015). She is currently working on a book-length study of post-war Sri Lankan literature in English.

Dr Angela Savage is a Melbourne writer, who has lived and travelled extensively in Asia. She won the 2004 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an unpublished manuscript, and the 2011 Scarlet Stiletto Award short story award. Angela holds a PhD in Creative Writing from Monash University and works as Director of Writers Victoria. Her novel Mother of Pearl will be published by Transit Lounge in 2019. http://angelasavage.wordpress.com/ @angsavage Photo by Suzanne Phoenix.

Dr Klaus Stierstorfer holds the Chair of British Studies at Muenster University, Germany. He studied English and Theology at Regensburg University and at the University of Oxford. He received his D.Phil. from Oxford University on 19th Century British Drama and, after a stint in teacher training in Bavaria, went back to Oxford on a post-doc scholarship and was elected Junior Research Fellow at St Cross College. He subsequently continued work for his postdoc thesis on the history British Histories of Literature at the University of Wuerzburg. His first professorship was at Duesseldorf University.

He has served as Vice President and as President of the Deutscher Anglistenverband, on the Board of ESSE and he is currently on the International Committee of IAUPE. He has held a Christensen Fellowship at St Catherine’s College, Oxford, and he is a corresponding Fellow of the English Association. He has published widely on British, Colonial and some Postcolonial Literature. He was coordinator of the EU-funded, Marie-Skłodovska-Curie Initial Training Programme CoHaB, codirector of the Europa-Kolleg in Muenster and is Director of the graduate training programme “Literary Form” funded by the German Research Council.

Dr Pavan Malreddy is a Researcher in English Literature at Goethe University Frankfurt. His recent publications include a monograph, Orientalism, Terrorism, Indigenism: South Asian Readings in Postcolonialism (SAGE, 2015) and a co-edited collection, Reworking Postcolonialism: Globalization, Labour and Rights (Palgrave, 2015).